Asia-Pacific News

Jul 6, 2009, 2:38 GMT

Shoppers in Hong Kong face plastic-bag tax to cut waste mountain

Hong Kong - Shoppers in Hong Kong were Monday preparing for a plastic bag tax aimed at cutting the city's daily mountain of waste. A tax of 50 Hong Kong cents (6 US cents) will be levied from Tuesday in a total of around 2,000 shops, including every major supermarket. Littering is a major problem in the former British colony, a densely populated city of 7 million which has one of the world's largest per capita carbon footprints. Around 30 million plastic bags a day are thrown away in Hong Kong - more than four per person - accounting for some 6 per cent of the 17,500 tons of rubbish sent to the city's landfill sites every day. Previous voluntary attempts to introduce charges on plastic bags in supermarkets have flopped, with one chain dropping a pilot scheme because of fierce opposition from customers. However, the city's environment secretary Edward Yau said he believed people in Hong Kong now understood the need for the charge and were ready for it. 'More and more people already bring their own shopping bags and use fewer plastic shopping bags as they know more about the importance of the environment to the future of Hong Kong,' Yau said.

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